Category: Past Writers Interviews

Karen, you’re very welcome to my Writers Chat. We last chatted in September 2016 upon the publication of the first in the Edgar Allan Poe trilogy Edgar Allan Poe and The London Monster. (I have re-published this chat below).

Edgar Allan Poe and The Jewel of Peru, the second in the trilogy was published in late August 2018 to critical acclaim and rave reviews including a starred review in Publishers Weekly, Shots Magazine calling it “a cleverly penned work of intrigue and enigma”, and the Historical Novel Review recommending it “for lovers of Poe’s writings, for those who enjoy the Gothic and macabre, and for all historical mystery fans.”

You are currently working on the third novel in the trilogy: Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead, set in Paris 1849. Point Blank Books (Oneworld Publications) is the UK publisher; Pegasus Books, USA; AST in Russia; Vulkan in Serbia; and Paris Yayincik in Turkey. Previous publications include Writing & Selling Crime Film Screenplays and Tattoos and Motorcycles (a collection of interconnected short stories), articles on screenwriting and cross-arts collaboration, along with a number of commissioned screenplays.

KLS: Thanks very much for chatting with me about the books, Shauna. Your insightful questions really got me thinking in a useful way as I try to finish book III: Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead.

Edgar Allan Poe’s House (Philadelphia) – Image by Karen Lee Street

SG: That’s so difficult, isn’t it – promoting one book whilst writing the next. Well, I have to say I devoured Edgar Allan Poe and The Jewel of Peru in almost one sitting but what struck me the most was that as well as serving as a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe and The London Monster, it is also a stand alone novel. Can you talk a little bit about how the three books in the trilogy are connected yet – it seems to me – written so that they can be read independently.

KLS: I’m glad you felt the first two books in the trilogy work as stand-alone novels as that was the intention and it’s normally essential when writing a crime or mystery series. For example, I’m a real fan of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels, but have been reading them completely out of order, which hasn’t bothered me at all, despite the inevitable jumping around in the development of his personal life and, more subtly, his character.

My trilogy is connected by its sleuthing duo: the writer Edgar Allan Poe and his character ur-detective C. Auguste Dupin. They are presented as old friends with similar interests but rather different approaches to life, Poe being more creative and emotional and Dupin strives to be very rational. Each novel sets up a mystery that must be solved, the ‘A’ story if you like. Other story strands are introduced that are further explored in subsequent novels. For example, Helena Loddiges is mentioned in Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster as she has hired Poe to edit an ornithology book. In Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru, she brings Poe a mystery to solve. C. Auguste Dupin’s nemesis is introduced in book I, but he eludes Dupin until Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead in which their attempt to apprehend him is the main story. The duo have very personal connections to the mysteries they must solve in each book and their adventures influence subtle changes in their characters.

SG: I enjoyed that personal/social/political thread running through the books. Once again you provide readers with a wonderfully intriguing opening (if not a little macabre!) inviting us into possibly the most striking element of the book – how you evoke birds, their worlds (both real and symbolic) through some wonderful sensual writing. Can you tell us a little about your research? I am sure it must have been fascinating.

KLS: I suppose the notion to write about birds was inspired by a favourite childhood book that belonged to my grandfather: Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson of the National Association of Audubon Societies, with colour illustrations by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Looking at those images as a child, prompted an interest in birds, as did Brief Bird Biographies, written and illustrated by a great-Uncle, J. Fletcher Street, who was an artist and amateur ornithologist. My father included birds frequently in his paintings, which was another inspiration.

The notion to write a story featuring ornithology and ornithomancy came from living in London Fields, Hackney, which I was surprised to learn had been the site of Loddiges plant nursery, the largest exotic plant nursery in Europe in the 19th century. I discovered that owner George Loddiges was a keen bird collector, which was a popular Victorian hobby. His famous hummingbird cabinet is held by the British Museum. This in part inspired the idea for the trilogy as Poe had gone to school in Stoke Newington, Hackney as a child and it’s quite possible he might have visited Loddiges nursery which was a tourist destination during that time. I also learned that George Loddiges hired Andrew Mathews to collect birds and plants for him in Peru, and that Mathews also did collecting for Bartram’s plant nursery in Philadelphia before he died in Peru, 1843. This connection proved a useful plot point in Jewel of Peru.

As I continued my research, odd links between Poe, Hackney and Philadelphia suggested a bird motif. Poe’s most famous poem is probably “The Raven”, allegedly inspired by Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge, which features Dickens’ pet raven Grip. Further, Dickens had Grip stuffed when he died and he now lives in the rare books room at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Additionally, in the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences had the largest and taxonomically most complete ornithological collection in the world, so certainly Poe would have been well-acquainted with the Victorian obsession for bird collecting. The sad sight of ‘collected’ birds displayed in the British Museum made me keen to include a subtle subplot regarding endangered birds. For example, when Poe lived in Philadelphia, there were still huge flocks of passenger pigeons that would literally darken the sky as they passed through the area. Now they are extinct due to the reckless hunting of them.

Loddiges Green House (Hackney, London) Image from Karen Lee Street

SG: Isn’t it wonderful that you have, in a way, brought the birds back to life and fascinating to hear how and where the trail of research led you to the heart of the story. I enjoyed the power play and games that each of the characters bring to the narrative. In particular, Miss Helena Loddiges and Rowena Fontaine (in disguise). Given that Poe and Dupin are the main players, you manage to incorporate some incredibly strong female characters. Was this deliberate or did the story evolve this way?

KLS: Very deliberate. Poe adored his wife Virginia and his mother-in-law ‘Muddy’ and I wanted to show that happy aspect of his life. Not much is written about Virginia’s character in the biographical material concerning Poe — she’s described as beautiful but that’s about it. I wanted to portray her as an intelligent woman Poe could have an intellectual conversation with, a woman who was very loyal to her friends and loved ones and therefore would insist on being involved in the investigation. Rowena Fontaine appears first in London Monster and uses her skills in unethical ways, but when she achieves her dream of being on stage, due to her undeniable talent, she becomes much more gracious and tries to end the vendetta between her husband and Poe. Muddy is very strong also, but in a highly practical sense; without her, Virginia and Poe would struggle to exist at all. Helena Loddiges is quite eccentric, but is an expert in her fields (ornithology and taxidermy). She has the strength of character to defy her father and leave the safety of home alone to seek justice for someone she loves.

SG: You also stay true to the politics of the day without taking the reader out of the spell of the mystery. I know part of the action is based on real riots in Philadelphia in 1844. Was it strange writing about historical riots (about immigrants) at a time when the US Government was talking about building walls to keep illegal immigrants out of America?

KLS: I decided to set Jewel of Peru in Philadelphia when I first thought of developing the Poe/ Dupin sleuthing duo into a trilogy, so that was well before the current US administration. When I started reading about the Nativist riots of 1844, I was shocked that we had never studied that part of Philadelphia history in school. (I was born in Philly and went to school in Pennsylvania.) It was strange after researching the 1844 riots when the term ‘nativist’ was suddenly (or so it seemed to me) being used in connection with current events and talk about building the wall. It was also odd for me to read feedback from a reader who felt I was referencing contemporary events too overtly in the riot scenes when actually I was writing about true events.

SG: Yes, us writers don’t always plan everything. There’s often some strange synchronicity when writing about one era and finding that the themes and even events suddenly appear in your present day. Very unnerving!

I have to confess that while I have enjoyed some of Poe’s writing, I wouldn’t be familiar with much of his works. One of the other layers to your trilogy are the subtle and clever references and nods to Poe’s own writing. How important was this part of the book for you, and would you like to comment on the intricate nature of threading references through the narrative?

The references to Poe’s works within the books, particularly Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster, are really just meant to be fun for those who know some of Poe’s work—an extension of Poe appearing in a story with one of his own characters. It’s not necessary at all to know Poe’s stories or poems to follow the plot. It would be wonderful, though, if someone new to Poe read the book and became interested in reading some of Poe’s work.

There are other allusions and connections explored in the trilogy that I think spring from the basic nature of writing historical fiction and creating an alternative biography/ history. In researching Poe, I read about some of the events that influenced his stories—for example, the true murder that inspired his tale “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”. Allusions to Poe’s stories play with the idea of what might trigger a writer’s imagination and inspire a creative work. When considering the idea of alternative history, odd connections I found when doing historical research provoked story ideas. Had Poe ever been taken to visit the renowned glasshouses of the Loddiges plant nursery in Hackney when he lived in Stoke Newington? Or did he ever visit the famous Bartram Gardens when he lived in Philadelphia? These ‘every day’ events might never be recorded in a biography, but might have inspired Poe in some way.

And finally, when one creates a story or a character that becomes part of the memory of its readers, it seems to take on its own life. This is relevant to Poe the reader, who was well-versed in the classics, but as an editor and a critic, also read enormous amounts of contemporary literature. In book III in particular, I explore the way characters and stories he admired might influence him, particularly in knowing that characters and narratives that live on after the writer. As Poe said:

“Ye who read are still among the living, but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows (…) and yet a few will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.”

What a wonderful quotation, Karen! Now, some fun questions:

Surf or Turf? ‘Surf’ for food; ‘turf’ as an environment. (Too many sharks in Australia.)

Oh I’m a big fan of Robinson too. Now what writer – living or dead – would you invite to high tea? Perhaps Gabriel García Márquez as his books were formative reading and were so exciting and fresh when I first devoured them. (I would invite myself to high tea at Edward Gorey’s to see his amazing house and cats and to hopefully find his life matched his stories.)

What’s on your to-read pile now? It’s a never-diminishing pile; at it’s top are two film scripts and Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which I really need to re-read while completing the editing of Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead.

What is the last book you read? I just finished Alice Munro’s short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage bought at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris while on a research trip. Munro creates such memorable characters and her descriptions are effortlessly visual and original. I’ve also been re-reading Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris — again, essential research.

Karen, Thanks, once again for being so generous with your answers. I wish you much continued success with the sleuthing duo of Poe and Dupin.

I’m delighted to welcome Karen Lee Street to my blog where she discusses her debut novel Edgar Allan Poe and The London Monster (Point Blank, (Oneworld Publications)) and answers questions sent in from a Dublin Crime Book Group.

Karen, this is the first of a trilogy which focuses on re-imagined or imagined adventures of the American author Edgar Allan Poe. Let’s start with that curiosity. Are the adventures re-imagined or imagined?

Both! The adventures of Edgar Allan Poe in London are primarily imagined; Poe did live in London as a child and I reference places and people he knew then, but Poe did not return to Europe as an adult, despite some wild tales he fabricated regarding exploits in Greece and St. Petersburg. Poe’s imagined adventures in the book are provoked by a collection of letters allegedly written by his grandparents that implicate them as the London Monster who slashed the skirts and derrières of over fifty women from 1788 – 1790; the victims, dates, and the locations of the crimes noted in the letters are based on fact, but the circumstances are heavily re-imagined. In my novel, C. Auguste Dupin, the great ‘ratiocinator’, is released from the confines of Poe’s three detective tales to investigate the letters Poe has inherited. I imagined a backstory for Dupin, extrapolating from the few details offered about his personal circumstances in Poe’s stories; this backstory sets up his own adventures in London and supports the key themes of the novel.

And they tell us backstories aren’t important! Point Blank have given you a wonderful cover and the title. Were you lucky enough to have a say in either or both?

My working title for the original stand-alone novel was C. Auguste Dupin and the London Monster, but when I pitched it as a trilogy of mysteries, my agent pointed out that it would be better to mention Edgar Allan Poe in the three titles. The sequel titles (at this stage) are Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru and Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead. I was forwarded the proposed dust jacket during the proofreading process and, happily, liked it very much as did friends I showed it to. I am the sort of bookshop browser who will pick up a book because I find the cover intriguing, so this was an enormous relief.

Yes. It touches on all the themes – the crime, the Gothic, the mystery and I love the black and white with the hint of gold. Now, you’ve previously spoken about your early introduction to Poe – what part do you think early reading plays in an author’s later writing or reading?

This is such an interesting question — I hadn’t realised how much my earliest reading material influenced this trilogy until contemplating it. I lived at my grandparents’ house for about a year and half, aged eight to nine, and spent an enormous amount of time reading my mother’s old books: the Nancy Drew mysteries, Grimm’s Fairytales, The Mother West Wind “Why” Stories, and The Book of Marvels, a collection of stories by adventurer Richard Halliburton which not only made me desperate to travel, but also inspired a subplot in Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru. (I’ve kept my grandparents’ copy of the book.) I also devoured all the biographies and magical adventure books in the school library. There’s a bit of all of that in the trilogy. Reading Poe himself came a couple of years later, when I enjoyed giving myself nightmares.

How curious! Enjoying giving yourself nightmares. It’s that push/pull thing, isn’t it. You’re scared but just also love it. I think it’s like loving Bertha in the attic in Jane Eyre but also being scared by her. And what a reading selection you’ve given me!

Letters have often been used as a device to tell alternative stories to the ‘main’ – I’m thinking here of Pamela – and the letters of Poe’s grandparents are used to great effect in this novel. In fact they are used, really, to tell the ‘real’ story and also provide commentary on relationships, gender, and sexuality. Can you comment on this?

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is an epistolary novel I admire for its depiction of the social mores of a particular time, place, and social group, but also for how a rather cruel game has emotional repercussions for its instigators. I wanted to do a similar thing with the letters exchanged by Poe’s grandparents; they reveal a secret history, but also chart the changes in their relationship and how actions driven by passion, jealousy, pride, and fear lead to a back-against-the-wall kind of choice that changes someone forever. Further, the characters’ choices are limited by their social class, financial position, and — in the case of Poe’s grandmother— gender. Indeed, many of her problems stem from the limited options she has due to being a woman and yet she proves herself to be a clever survivor who defies social conventions and twice puts love and personal independence before financial security.

A Dublin Crime Book group have read this book and loved it. They have a few questions for you:

How did you come to link the real crimes of the London Monster to Poe?

Oddly, I can’t actually remember a ‘eureka moment’ of coming to the idea of linking Edgar Allan Poe to the London Monster; I think it was a case of stored up potential story ideas coalescing into something. When I first read about the London Monster, I was fascinated by the story and felt it could be the basis of a great film with the right framework. It seemed likely to me that the person sent to prison for the crimes had been falsely accused (for the reward offered), so who was the true culprit? I first read about the Monster in John Ashton’s Old Times, A Picture of Social Life at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Collected and Illustrated from the Satirical and Other Sketches of the Day. (John C. Nimmo, 1885). Ashton’s recounts the Monster attacks in quite a jocular way, reflecting the sardonic tone of late 18th century cartoons featuring the Monster by James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank. Jan Bondeson adopts the same tone in his book The London Monster, a Sanguinary Tale. I think these lighthearted approaches to the Monster’s odd crimes reminded me of some of Poe’s hoaxes and humorous works, which probably initially triggered the idea to connect the father of the detective story with the ‘cold case’ of the London Monster. Further, I remembered from a biographical preface to a collection of Poe’s works that his grandparents were actors on the London stage when the Monster was at large and there were theories at the time that an actor or actors with a facility for disguise were the true culprits behind the Monster’s crimes.

Tell us about the real timing and the fictitious story of Poe’s grandparents.

Reports of a ‘Monster’ attacking women on the streets of London began in 1788 and escalated after the Queen’s birthday celebrations late January 1790. John Julius Angerstein offered a reward for the villain’s capture and conviction in May 1790 and soon after one of the Monster’s victims accused a man of being her attacker. He was convicted after two farcical trials and served six years in prison. Coincidentally, Poe’s grandfather disappears from records in 1790, at roughly the time the accused was imprisoned, and his grandmother and mother set sail for Boston in November 1795, arriving 3 January 1796, just when the accused was released from prison. This timing fit nicely with the idea that Poe’s grandparents might be the true culprits behind the Monster’s crimes and that his grandmother feared repercussions from the person who took the rap.

The ping-pong of Poe and Dupin as a double act – both fact and fiction – works particularly well in the novel. Can you talk about how this evolved as you were writing the various drafts?

Of course I revisited Poe’s three Dupin tales to reacquaint myself with his character, voice, mannerisms, to try to lift him from the page and put him in new situations. I suggested that the unknown narrator in the Dupin stories is Poe himself, that he met Dupin in Paris as the narrator did in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. I also read a number of Poe’s letters as found on the www.EAPOE.org site, again to get a sense of his personal voice. As Dupin is the ultimate ratiocinator, highly intellectual, dispassionate, and uncannily good at deduction, I wanted to focus on Poe’s use of imagination along with logic when trying to solve a mystery, but being tripped up by his emotions and the entire issue of family. As Dupin is depicted as a genius of ratiocination, I needed a personal obstacle — something in his character — that would undermine his efforts at solving Poe’s mystery, and I settled on a desire for revenge, a key theme in the novel. When Dupin begins to crumble due to his suppressed emotions regarding his own family, Poe has to pull himself together and utilise his ratiocination skills in conjunction with his imagination.

And I think that’s what makes your book so special: how the imagination and the rational are so well entwined. Finally, Karen, after bombarding you with detailed questions, can you please whet our appetite about the next two books in the trilogy?

Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru is set in Philadelphia, 1844, where Poe wrote some of his best known tales. Poe’s benefactress, Helena Loddiges, a bird taxidermist from the famous Loddiges plant nursery in Hackney, East London enlists Poe to solve the murder of her father’s bird collector in Peru. Poe and Dupin are drawn into a mystery involving archaeological looting, ornithomancy, a kidnapping, and treasure books, against the backdrop of Philadelphia’s Nativist riots.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead will be set in 1849, after Dupin invites Poe to help him vanquish his nemesis, the man who ruined the Dupin family during the French Revolution and during the Reign of Terror. The duo are soon embroiled in a battle of wits fought within Paris’s famous necropolis, a strange underground city full of unexpected riches and secrets, assisted by Dupin’s band of ‘Apaches’, criminals who live in the catacombs and answer to their own laws.

Thank you, Karen, for putting such thought into the myriad of questions and for making me want to re-read the book again! I am so looking forward to the next two books.

I’m delighted that the eleventh post in my “Writers Chat” series is with Jane Clarke where we re-visit an old chat about her debut poetry collection The River and talk a little about her forthcoming second collection, When the Tree Falls.

SG: Jane, since the publication of The River in June 2015, you’ve been kept busy with one foot in the camp of creating new material and the other in continuing to give public readings, appearances and workshops.

You have also won various awards such as the Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award (2016), Hennessy Literary Award for poetry (2016). And, of course The River was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Literary Award. Many congratulations!

How have you found this process of managing the private creation of new writing and the public promotion of ‘old’ writing?

JC: Thanks very much, Shauna, for republishing my previous interview. It has indeed been a very busy time but well worth it to have so many opportunities to read my work, to meet readers and to perform with other poets and also musicians. The River has taken me to all kinds of interesting places and I’ve been honoured and delighted with the response to the poems. The private work of the poet entails getting new poems going and then working to get each one as good as it can possibly be. You definitely need plenty of quiet, reflective time for this. But when the poems are ready, I believe it’s really important to get them out into the world; readings, prizes, social media, youtube are all ways of doing that. I once heard Don Patterson say that poetry is a public art and I agree. Poetry, like music, needs the interaction of writer and reader/listener through live events.

I never expected such a warm response to The River. It’s a privilege to touch other people’s lives in this way. There’s nothing better than someone telling me they have The River beside their bed, or that the copy on the kitchen table is dog-eared or that they’ve given it to a friend who’s ill or that someone borrowed their copy and never gave it back or that their mother loves it. I’ve learned that when you publish your poems, you give them away and these intense little objects gain meaning and resonsance for others that has nothing to do with me personally.

SG: Yes, for a writer it is heart-warming to receive responses like that from readers. There’s a magic to how published work gains a life and meaning of its own, a beautiful exchange of a gift between the writer/writing, and the reader/reading.

Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on now and how your second collection is coming along?

JC: Yes, I’m working on my second full-length collection, When the Tree Falls. It’s due for publication with Bloodaxe Books in the autumn of 2019, which I have to say is both daunting and exciting. I feel very fortunate to have the support and imprimatur of my editor, Neil Astley and all in Bloodaxe Books. The experience of accompanying my very close friend, poet Shirley McClure, and my father in their final illnesses has deeply influenced this collection.

I know there’ll be poets reading this interview who miss Shirley very much. She was warm, generous and beautiful, a gifted creative writing tutor and a smashing poet. Her many fans will be glad to know that her publisher, Arlen House, plan to bring out a Collected Shirley McClure over the next year or so.

I’m also working with the Mary Evans Picture Library in London on a sequence of poems in response to a World War I family archive of letters and photographs. I’ve never worked on a project like this before and I’ve learnt a lot about the First World War and also the wealth of other artistic responses to the war, including poetry. It’s quite a challenge to find fresh ways of writing about the experience. I’m conscious of the dangers of over-statement and worn-out imagery and have sought an allusive, “tell it slant” approach.

One other piece of work is co-editing, with Nessa O’Mahony, the special Irish issue of the much-loved UK poetry magazine, The North. It‘ll be published late this year with a big launch in Poetry Ireland. We hope it will showcase lots of wonderful work by Irish poets and reflect the incredibly vibrant poetry scene here. I’d like to acknowledge Peter and Ann Sansom’s generosity and vision in giving us this opportunity to present and promote Irish poetry. It is particularly valuable and resonant in the midst of the anxiety and sadness about Brexit.

SG: Jane, it sounds like you are in a powerful creative space, right now.

I love the title of your next collection, When the Tree Falls. And what a wonderful tribute to your dear friend Shirley, and your father, that the privilege, heartbreak and grief around their passing has been so carefully and lovingly tended to in poetry.

It is heartening to hear that Arlen House will bring out Collected Shirley McClure.

The world war poems sound fascinating, I’m already intrigued by the process. Thank you for sharing that.

I really look forward to The North, and congratulations on what sounds like a brilliant project.

Now I’d love to hear about any readings or events you have coming up over the next while.

JC: I’m looking forward to going to the Lake District to run a “Writing & Dry-Stone Walling” workshop with James Rebanks, the author of The Shepherd’s Life. Both our books were shortilisted for the Ondaatje Award and we’ve kept in touch since. The workshop is part of the Rural Writer’s Institute and I’m looking forward to meeting lots of other rural/nature writers there. http://www.kathrynaalto.com/writing/rural-writing-institute/

The poet, Eileen Casey, has edited a new anthology of poems responding to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh. As he’s one of my favourite poets, I’m honoured to have a poem included, responding to a gorgeous short poem of his, “Consider the Grass Growing.” The anthology, The Lea-Green Down, will be launched in the Irish Writers Centre on the 18th July at 6.30pm. I also have a new poem in the Arlen House/Hodges Figgis Anthology, Reading the Future. I’ll be reading at one of the series of launches planned over the coming months.

At the end of August I’ll be going on the road with the wonderful traditional and classical musicians, Eamon Sweeney and Cormac Breathnach, for a series of concerts as part of Heritage Week, 2018. I’m giving a talk about the First World War poets and reading from my own sequence in Richmond Barracks as part of the Festival of History in October. And on the horizon, there’s another trip to the US for a number of readings.

SG: It really sounds like you have a wonderful few months ahead of you, Jane. I wish you the very best of luck and I’m sure both you and your audiences will enjoy the events very much.

Thanks, once again, for stopping by and I’d love to have back to talk more deeply about your second collection.

Below is our Q&A originally published in October 2015.

Q&A with Jane Clarke originally published in October 2015.

First of all congratulations, Jane Clarke, on the publication in June 2015, by Bloodaxe, of your debut collection The River. It is beautifully produced with a front cover image that somehow reflects the depth of the emotions and narratives within. I’m delighted to feature you on my blog and chat about The River.

SG: I’d like to learn more about the process of ‘producing’ The River. How did you select the 50 poems that made it to the final collection and how easily or difficult did the title come to you? And finally, did you have any input to the design?

JC: I began writing poetry ten years ago and about four years later I started to think about drawing together a collection. It took another four years before I had it ready to send out to publishers. Over that period I did an MPhil in Writing in the University of South Wales where I was given invaluable help with my growing collection, including the crucial advice not to rush it and to take more time. It was relatively easy to select the poems because I was adamant that only the very best of what I had written could go in. There were a few I wasn’t sure about which got moved in and out a number of times. The collection was accepted for publication in late July 2014 but I was still editing newer poems for it right up to the day I sent the final manuscript in March 2015. The hardest part of “making” the collection was the sequencing, which I changed many times. In ways it was like writing a poem; doing a draft, reading it, redrafting, putting it away for a while and then coming back to it and drafting again. In shaping the collection I was looking for a thread through the collection as a whole as well as variety and movement and also resonances between and among poems. My friends and colleagues, Shirley McClure, Geraldine Mitchell, Grace Wells and Yvonne O’Connor all helped me with this along the way. Meantime my workshop group was helping me with individual poems.

One of my first ideas for the title was Where the river deepens so the river was there from the start. Somewhere along the way I realized I wanted it to be The River, to reflect what I saw as the strongest poem in the collection and also to reflect the themes of change and loss and what nature offers us.

I had very little input into the design and I was more than happy to leave that to Neil Astley. When he wrote to confirm that he would be publishing my collection, he suggested the image of the heron, inspired by a line in one of my poems, “River at Dawn”.

………………………………………… A Heron flies up

from the callows, leads river and rowers

into the day, lean in, catch, pull back, release.

I love the cover and the lay-out and I have no doubt that the beauty of the production has brought quite a few readers to the book.

SG: As a fiction writer, I am always fascinated by and in awe at how poets often seamlessly feature place so strongly in their work. In this collection we move through fields, farmyards, rivers, lighthouses – some place-specific – and cities. Parallel to place, notions of ownership and belonging seep through as themes. Was there a conscious sense of themes corresponding to places in your life as you pieced the collection together in the order that it is in, or was this something that appeared organically?

JC: When I began writing I had no idea that place would feature so strongly in my work. But the poems kept coming out of the landscape and physical surroundings of various times in my life; growing up on a farm in Roscommon, my fifteen years studying and working in Dublin, living in Wicklow since then and other places that have mattered to me along the way. I can see now that the physical details of place both carry and express the emotions in my poems. The containment of place gives me a way of exploring relationships, ambivalent emotions and themes of belonging and identity. But I did not set out intentionally to do that. I have learned from drawing together my collection that if you let it, poetry will inevitably reflect and engage with your questions and concerns at the time you are writing. Some of these are questions you will repeatedly return to and others are of a particular time. I have been amazed to find how much of the process of writing poetry is an unconscious process. That is not to say that it doesn’t involve conscious dedication and craft but there is a well of unconscious associations influencing the work that sometimes seems magical. For example I only realised that “Among the Cows” was inspired by my grandmother’s life when I put it next to another poem about her in my collection.

SG: That’s fascinating, Jane, how the themes grew organically. It’s true that place in The River also extends to the place of our hearts – and memories. I’m thinking of the first poem in the collection: ‘Honey’ or ‘Rhode Island Reds’, poems which begin in one emotional, almost sentimental place, and end, shockingly and yet movingly, in an entirely different place. Or, in contrast, the brilliantly titled, heart wrenching ‘Every life’ which grounds us in the bodily place of possibility and impossibility.

JC: Thanks Shauna, I appreciate how you express your response to my poems. For me, part of the power of poetry is how it can allow the poet to write out of and into loss, either their own or the imagined loss of others. I have these lines from Macbeth on a yellow post-it above my desk, Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break. To do this without sentimentality or self-pity, you need to be available to a depth of emotion as well as being able to stand at a distance from it. The restrictions of the poetic form can contain grief that feels uncontainable. Poems can’t give resolution or consolation but I have found that they can say what seems unsayable, evoke what has been unknown and that they can accompany, comfort and sometimes sustain others. Robert Frost says it for me: “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

SG: That last line by Frost could apply to any form of creative writing, actually. Now while many of the poems are solid, and grounded in the specific, there are a few that have an undercurrent of the unconscious world of dreams, where danger is at the edges waiting to be acknowledged. The magical first stanza of ‘On the boat’:

“On the boat we were mostly virgins,/We talked about who we were going to be – /waitresses, seamstresses, nurses,/we didn’t talk about why we had to leave.”

Could you tell us a little bit more about this poem, for example the use of ‘mostly’ and the sense of journey and hope.

JC: I am always a little wary of talking about what a poem means for me because I don’t want to influence the reader’ response. But I know myself how interesting it is to hear a poet write about the background to a poem. “On the Boat” was inspired by Julia Otsuka’s novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese women migrating to the US in search of husbands. It set me thinking about all the Irish women who had migrated to the States in search of a better life. A visit to the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side also influenced the poem. The first line is the first line in Otsuka’s novel and what I liked about it was the question in “mostly” that let us imagine all the many reasons women left their home places apart from poverty or a sense of adventure, including rape, sexual abuse and pregnancy outside of marriage. I think it is what is not said as well as the strong rhythm, rhyme and repetition of the pantoum form that conveys a sense of mystery and at times menace as well as hope. There is also the intimation that regardless of getting the opportunity to start all over again, there are memories both wanted and unwanted that we carry with us.

SG: Of course, it’s a bit of a tricky question – almost like asking about inspiration! And now to my last question. Kent Haruf, one of my go-to writers who sadly passed away last year said in his last interview “The obvious thing is to read, read, read, read, read. Then write, write, write. There is no way around it.” As a poet, can you relate to this? When you are not writing, what are you reading? And what are you reading right now?

JC: I loved Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, Shauna. I hadn’t read his advice before but I totally agree with it. I find that reading both prose and poetry feeds my work. Reading sets off thoughts, memories and emotional responses. It can be a place, a time, a person that is evoked or sometimes just one word or a mood or tone sets something alight. When I haven’t been writing or when I want to get something started but can’t find a way in, it helps to take out a poetry anthology or a collection from a poet that interests me, read through it at random and just see what is sparked off. I always have a novel on the go; at the moment is Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie whose writing is just getting better and better. I’m reading Caitriona O’Reilly’s latest, Geis and also Philip Larkin these days as well as dipping into Richard Mabey’s Weeds. I’m also reading Colm Tóbín’s very personal study of Elizabeth Bishop, who is one of my favourite poets. I remember when I first read her advice to a younger poet, “read a lot of poetry – all the time… anything at all almost that’s any good, from the past – until you find out what you really like, by yourself”. Only then should one proceed to “the great poets of our own century… and not just two or three poems of each… read ALL of somebody. Then read his or her life, and letters, and so on… Then see what happens.”

As regards the second part of Haruf’s advice, “write, write, write”, it is good to be reminded of it. The more I write, the more I need to write. There can be so much fear asscoiated with writing; fear of exposure, of failure, of coming across as ridiculous and yet we have to risk it, we have to put ourselves into words if we want to move closer to the writer we want to become. The advice I would add to that of Haruf and Bishop is to join a writing group and to set up a poetry reading group, on the lines of a book club.

SG: Thank you to Jane for such informative, and open answers. You can listen to a wonderful interview and reading with Jane on RTE Arena here and keep up with Jane’s readings and poetry on her website.

The fourth post in my “Writers Chat” series is mix of old and new chats: a re-post of a chat with Nuala O’Connor from August 2015 on her third novel Miss Emily and a new preview chat about Becoming Belle which Sebastian Barry has declared to be “luminous”. Becoming Belle will be published in August 2018.

What a beautiful cover, Nuala. So tell me about this stage in the publishing process – after the writing, editing, and proofs… and before the publication date (August 2018).

NUALA: This is the easy part because all the difficult work is done. Now it’s time for gentle pre-publicity (sending out advance copies to key people: journalists and literary types of all hue) before the real PR push starts. I’m taking a week out in May to write articles, essays etc. about the book for promo purposes; I’m hoping by devoting a week to it, that I’ll get a lot done. It’s a time consuming business. I won’t be able to write much on my novel-in-progress during the promotional months for Becoming Belle. That’s maybe the only downside as the act of writing keeps me balanced in myself. And sane…

The story of Belle sounds utterly fascinating. Tell us how you came to write about her and her links to Ballinasloe.

NUALA: Like a lot of things, I tried her out first in a poem (a pretty crappy vilanelle). Then I wrote a flash about her. When I keep returning to a subject, it’s begging for more. I moved to Ballinasloe 13 years ago and researched the history of the town and soon came across this music hall girl who had married the local Viscount amid some scandal. She was a beauty and much loved in Ballinasloe; I was interested in knowing more about this maverick English woman who ended up in rural Ireland as the Countess Clancarty, despite being a dancer and not being from gentry.

When can we get our hands on Becoming Belle?

NUALA: It is published here, there and all over in August 2018. I really can’t wait for people to read about Belle – she is feminist, feisty and fresh. I gave my parents an advance copy of the book and my Da said he ‘fell in love’ with Belle. What better review could you get?

Wow, that is surely the best review any writer could get – that your reader falls in love with your heroine. I can’t wait to read it in August 2018!

*****

Q&A (originally published in August 2015) with Nuala about Miss Emily

*****

I start this blog post with a confession. I have always considered my tastes to reside in the modern. Miss Emily, set in the late nineteenth century however, is written in O’Connor’s beautiful lyrical prose with feminist leanings. The novel not only brings us into the world of the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, but also Ada Concannon, a feisty Dubliner who follows in the footsteps of her aunt and uncle in the hope of better prospects in Amherst, Massachusetts.

I raise my hands, humbly, and declare that I was hooked from the first page with the complex characters of Emily and Ada, the lush imagery and bountiful senses, and a story that, from the start, gets you asking questions, and reading on. As a fan of Dickinson’s poetry, Miss Emily gave me a unique glimpse into her sense of self as a writer. Many of Emily’s sections are poetic in themselves, beautiful prose. Consider these musings, for example:

“I write by night now, when nothing thrums but my lamp…The house sleeps; Amherst sleeps. Only I endure. And when my pencil tires of flicking word arrows onto the page, there is the moon to admire, full-faced and lovely, a bright coin…”

Miss Emily, however, could also be enjoyed and relished by readers not familiar with – or even interested in – Dickinson as a writer. Here’s quite an accomplishment: O’Connor manages to hook you into this well-paced story while also providing convincing and fascinating glimpses into the life – imagined – of such a known poet.

Thank you, Nuala, for a wonderful read – on a northern Spanish beach (as per above photo!). I’m delighted to be part of Miss Emily Blog Tour!

There is a wonderful sense of place in Miss Emily from the Dublin Liffey and life as a maid downstairs to the workings of the kitchen, the stables, and herb garden in the Dickinson household in Amherst.

“The goddess Pomona has been around the orchard scattering her goodness: everything is floral and abundant, while the apple maggots and cabbage worm do their best to undo it all.”

The sense of place – and the atmosphere throughout the novel – seems to me to be as connected to the characters – Ada and Miss Emily – as it is to their respective countries – Ireland and America. In some way, Ada echoes Emily’s attachment to the indoors, how rushes of homesickness hit her at times. It strikes me that Miss Emily is not just about Emily Dickinson.

NUALA: Ada, the young maid, is the active character in the story, given Emily’s reclusiveness, which is beginning to be her preferred state by 1866, when the novel is set. The novel is about cross-generational friendship, the maid-mistress relationship, emigration and loyalty. It’s also about what it means to be a female maverick in the nineteenth century and what the consequences of that can be. And, yes, it’s about place – setting is important to me in fiction. For my own sake I need to inhabit the places I write about and really feel the setting loom large around me. The research for that – flora, fauna, architecture – is part of the thrill of writing for me.

I was enthralled by the day-to-day detail of living, and working – of course reflected in the beautiful covers of the US and UK editions, and in the novel from the instructional gift Ada receives from Mrs Dickinson (The Frugal Housewife by Mrs Child) and all the advice it gives, to the vision of Emily Dickinson lowering a basket full of delicious gingerbread for the children. Did you have fun researching and playing around with historical details such as these?

NUALA: The research was a joy. I research as I write, mostly, and unearthing new and interesting details about domestic life in the nineteenth century was always a pleasure. I baked Emily’s recipes, I bought myself an old glass churn and made butter, I (squeamishly) watched YouTube videos on how to skin hares. I studied The Frugal Housewife and made it, as Mrs Dickinson suggested, Ada’s second Bible. I read close on thirty books by or about Emily in the course of the research – about her relationships, her poetry, her life in general. I wanted to get things right, to be loyal to her; I fell deeply for her warmth and wit while writing the book.

That joy really comes through in the novel, Nuala. Now tell me about the baking. I just adored the scenes with Emily and Ada in the kitchen, the dynamics between them and how each of their personalities seem to shine, and their friendship bloom, as they bake.

“I take dried pears from their jar; they were as pink as plums when picked, with crinoline hips and the flesh of candies. Now they curl – silenced yellow tongues – in my hand. I glance at Ada, and she is smiling roundly, forgetting now her Daniel and his saving of her from the lion. She uses her hands to mix together raisins and citron rind; the smell is glorious.”

In fact, I wished there were recipes at the back of the book – perhaps there will be on your website?

NUALA: I love to cook and bake, and that was what drew me back to Emily later in life, having studied her poetry at school. Some of the articles I have written, for Reader’s Digest in Canada for example, featured recipes, as does the Penguin Book Club Guide to the book. Some of Emily’s recipes (tweaked by me) can also be found at my cooking blog, The Hungry Veggie Her Coconut Cake is a sweet, buttery, easy cake – I make it all the time now for visitors. My cousin Clodagh and I are going to bake some of Emily’s cakes for the launch (details below).

How wonderful – I’ll try those recipes out and look forward to samples at your launch! I relished the way the themes of gender and equality are peppered through the book, and with Ada as our perceptive observer, some of the expectations of women can be seen – tenderly – in the relationship between Emily and Susan, her sister-in-law, and how, through her poetry and solitude, Emily manages to escape some of these expectations.

“I simply do not feel comfortable in a throng; my head gets addled, and I long for peace. And Sue may not comprehend either the writer’s absolute need for quiet and retreat, the solace of it…I put my lips to her cheek and tell the curl of ear, ‘I prefer to have you alone. That way you are all mine.’”

NUALA: Women were expected to marry in nineteenth century Amherst, so Emily and her sister Vinnie were an unusual pair of spinsters. But they were well-to-do – their father was a lawyer and when he died their lawyer brother looked after them. So, in a sense, they had the luxury of being rebels. The Dickinson family were eccentric, they were clever and good leaders, important in the town, but they did things in their own way. Emily loved her sister-in-law Sue fervently – Sue was editor, friend and confidante to her.

I really enjoyed the way their relationship developed so tenderly over the course of the book. Yet there are also strong, and complex, male characters in Miss Emily: Emily’s brother Austin is an interesting character who, I can say, without revealing the plot, grows and changes through the novel; Patrick seems to be the antithesis to Daniel yet both are believable characters who provide yet another kind of insight into the Dickinsons, and, interestingly, reveal certain views of the Irish and class.

NUALA: I made Austin Dickinson quite anti-Irish in the novel – he may not have been as racist as I portrayed him. Ada and Emily are both such sweet, decent creatures, I needed the contrast of the fiery Austin, blowing in and out with his mad red hair, negative opinions and grumpy face. He and Emily were very close as children but once he became a responsible citizen and husband, Austin became more serious.

Patrick and Daniel are two sides of the Irish emigrant: the drunken layabout and the hard-working, go-ahead type.

And a question more than a comment, will we discover, in the future, what became of Ada and Daniel?

NUALA: I was asked this question a lot on my American book tour – I think it’s a good sign because it means people like the characters, and care enough about them, to hope for a good future for them. I have no plans to return to Ada and Daniel but I feel that life went well for them in the end: deep love, happiness – the whole shebang!

Sounds great! Nuala, I’d love to hear you read from Miss Emily. I know you have already given some readings (for example at the West Cork Literary Festival), where might we next find you with Miss Emily in hand?

NUALA: I will read a little from the book at my launch in The Gutter Book Shop, Dublin, Friday 28th August, 6.30pm. (All welcome!)

The third post in my “Writers Chat” series is mix of old and new chats: a re-post of a chat with Alan McMonagle about his second short story collection Pyschotic Episodes and a new chat about his highly acclaimed debut novel Ithaca…

Alan since our last “Writers Chat” five years ago, your writing has gone from strength to strength, most recently with the astounding and well-deserved success of your debut novel Ithaca (Picador, 2017).

The Irish Times described it as a “fierce and funny modern odyssey” and while I do not disagree, I wonder if what they have described is what essentially makes up all stories – that of the hero’s journey. Did you set out to write Jason’s story as an odyssey (I’m thinking of the title here, of course, and the reference to Greek mythology) or did the story start with character and then evolve into an odyssey as you, the writer, journeyed with Jason?

When it comes down to it there are two stories to tell: a person goes in search of something and a stranger comes to town. This remark has been attributed to many writers, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Jason’s ‘search’ arrived fully formed from the get-go, a journey of sorts slowly began to present itself as the basis of a narrative arc. Jason’s story, however, started out as a voice. A youthful voice, playful and unreliable, that evolved into a character and to whom I bequeathed a hinterland, a stomping ground along with its motley population with whom Jason was going to interact in varying degrees. This mix of voice and character, of setting and encounters, I suppose, offered a tension that helped sustain a narrative thrust. However, from the outset I always felt there was a gaping hole in Jason’s psyche. And the further the narrative progressed the stronger this feeling took hold. Writing is an act of faith, and so I pursued my wayward narrative in the hope that what this gaping hole was would eventually present itself. As a writer I spent a lot of time looking outside of Jason. To his nearest and dearest. To his enemies. To pretty much everyone with whom he was interacting. I was constantly looking to the hinterland, to the claustrophobic horizons of Jason’s stomping ground. I was three quarters way through a solid draft when I realized I was looking in the wrong places. I shouldn’t be looking outside of Jason – I should be looking inside. This guy literally wouldn’t harm a fly, I said to myself. The only person he is a danger to is himself. And then it came to me – he is a self-harmer. He is a self-harmer because he is in need of a hero – a parental figure – he can look to. And so I went back to the beginning. And in this manner the narrative of Ithaca takes on that classical trope of the hero’s journey – but I think it is very much an inner journey, in addition to the more obvious outward journey as Jason strikes out beyond the confines of his stomping ground. So really the evolution voice into character provides the basis for the quest my narrator sets himself.

What a fascinating insight into your process, Alan. Lots to ponder here about character formation and narrative voice. Now the town, in Ithaca like in much of your short fiction, is another character. Tell me about the divisions of the town – the Swamp, McMorrows, Rich Hill – and how they might echo the divisions and gaps in Jason’s own life.

Great question. The Swamp, McMorrow’s, Rich Hill are key locations for Jason as he sets about locating his elusive ‘Da’. The Swamp is where he first meets the Girl. She is in the water, and thinking the worst, he fishes her out and so begins one of the story’s two central relationships. A relationship that provides Jason with a means to reveal a side of himself he will most likely otherwise conceal. Another location, Rich Hill, provides Jason with a taster of how the other half lives, the ‘haves’ as opposed to the ‘have-nots’. Rich Hill in general and Fat Grehan’s unfinished mansion in particular serve to highlight Jason’s ‘wrong side of the tracks’ origins. It’s also the part of town where he gives himself permission to lash out at his circumstances and terms of existence. It’s where he is most likely to get in trouble, fall foul of the law and so forth. A third key locale, McMorrow’s (‘dimly lit pub’), is where he goes to seek out Flukey, the initial candidate Jason posits as his Da. And so, yes, the pub is representative of another crucial gap in Jason’s existence, and as far as Jason is concerned, probably the gap that matters most. At the end of his famous play Life Of Galileo, Brecht has Galileo’s friend say, Unlucky the man that has no heroes. And Galileo says, Lucky the man that needs no heroes. Well, for better or worse, my little guy needs a hero, and in his case it involves a journey that is a mix of humour and pain and chaos and desperation. A journey that involves a search for someone or something that may remain out of reach, elusive. And ultimately what I think the narrative of Ithaca is trying to do is convey the measures Jason is prepared to take as his search becomes more desperate and he finally begins to realize that who or what he is looking for may be a lot to closer to home than he is ready to believe when we first meet him. The locales you mention in your question, along with one or two others, all have a part to play.

Yes, I love how everything in Ithaca fits together. There are no wasted characters in this landscape.

Read on for the Writers Chat Alan and I had in 2013 about his short story collection Psychotic Episodes.

I’ve just finished Psychotic Episodes, one of the few story collections I have read in one sitting. It seemed to me that what brought all the stories together was that thread of the absurd coupled side by side with a sense of dread and caustic humour. Tell me, did you have a plan or a vision for this collection or did it evolve into itself?

A plan – definitely not. In fact I am fairly certain that each of the stories has their own story to tell as to how they came into existence. One or two arrived unannounced from the farthest recesses of my imagination and insisted on writing themselves with little or no input from myself. One or two literally fell out of larger pieces that were paying absolutely no heed to anything I was telling them to do. Others were not so keen until they looked a certain way and so needed a little finessing. Others said to hell with the rules, let’s just go for it. The upshot of all of this is that I am, at various times, an instinctive, reluctant, plodding, spontaneous writer. It was only when I started looking over what had accumulated that the common ground began apparent – the absurdity and chaos you refer to, that teetering on the brink. The stories are in a big way influenced by my own reading and, of course, by my own latent sensibilities, how I perceive and receive the world.

I’m interested, also, in the sequencing of the stories. You start with the moving ‘Looking after Little Patrick’ – I love the child’s name here and though there is something shocking about the cocktail making at the start, by the mid to end of the story I was laughing out loud and feeling they were all having a lovely time until, of course, your killer ending, which wiped the smile off my face and left me feeling guilty for laughing!

Your question, as well as being so well thought out, is also the ideal compliment you can give this particular story, Shauna. My good writing friend and all round purveyor of lightning wisdom, Ger Mills, says my stories snuggle up to you and then take a bite. I like this description and think it can be applied to the story you speak of. The story is essentially a psycho-drama – with the comedy thrown in. At the time I was re-reading Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and sitting up late watching Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton go at it in the film version. Also, at the time, my neighbours’ little baby seemed intent on establishing a new world record for crying. Also, at the time, my girlfriend and myself were given our little nephew for the day. Somehow the disparate yet timely elements coalesced. Instinctively, I placed this story as the opening story for the tone it quickly sets, for the early flavour it provides of the skewed sensibilities in the stories. It was also the first story I finished after my first collection.

That’s really interesting, such an insight into the creation of the story, and indeed, the collection. I’d like to hear about how you get into character. You’re fond of first person voice and move well between a child’s voice (‘The Story Teller and the Thief’ and ‘Runaways’) and a female voice (‘Psychotic Episodes’).

I am an aural learner (as opposed to the more common visual learning). And so, in any piece of writing, I need to ‘hear’ everything – narration, reflection, observation – in addition to dialogue. In my own reading there are writers I return to time and time again precisely for this purpose. William Saroyan (his wonderful take on childhood). Flannery O’Connor (for the darkness). Sergei Dovlatov (for the chaos). Grace Paley and Amy Hempel (great female voices). These (among others), if you like, are my tuning forks. I’ve read about the so-called advantages of the third person narrator, its flexibility and omniscience. However, I feel if you have a strong enough ‘voice’ then a first person narrative becomes an essential part of story.

I must look Hempel up I don’t know her work. Now, tell me about endings. You have some wonderful ones – ‘Gutted’ and the wonderfully titled ‘Elizabeth Taylor and the Tour de France Cyclist’. Are you ever surprised by the endings that come to you as you write or do you plan the ending?

Almost every time – surprised. Which is why I think writing is an act of faith – at some point in the future you are depending upon something presenting itself (an ending, for example) that doesn’t yet exist. Endings, as well as beginnings, are delicate, require soft hands. It is what takes you from beginning to end that involves cement and mortar and blood and tears. I think it was Philip Larkin, of all people, who said a good story should have a beginning, a muddle and an end. All too often I find myself muddling…And then, from nowhere it seems, a way out – an ending – offers itself. The two stories you refer to here are good examples.

What a wonderful quote, I love the idea of muddling. But I have to ask you if you cycle – I like the way cycling and bikes feature in the collection, almost little creatures in themselves.

Bicycles as little creatures – what a lovely observation…I take a push bike around the narrow Galway streets. On my way in to town, there is a certain road I always use because it slopes downhill and so gets me where I have to be quickly and without huge effort. However, there is a certain hour in the day – early to mid-afternoon – whereupon if you find yourself on this road and on a bicycle you really are running the gauntlet. I also take my bike out on the backroads near where I live. I am restless by nature, need to be in motion, and it amazes me some of the ideas that arrive while pedalling through the desolation and dignity of Old Clybaun.

I think the collection holds some of that desolation and dignity. But I was also tickled by nostalgia with all the references to 99s, flakes, Tayto crisps and I laughed out loud at the ‘Bloomsday Bus Driver’ which seems quintessentially Irish to me with the ice-creams, the desperation to catch every last ray of sun, the need, generally to get and keep something good while it’s still going. Any reflections on this?

My grandfather used to work on the buses out of Sligo. Occasionally I would tag along, the five-mile trip from Sligo town to Rosses Point being a particular favourite. ‘Bus Driver’ (in many ways) is a slender story, but I like its simplicity, its purity, which I feel is in keeping with the time it is attempting to reflect. A couple of people whose judgement I respect have said to me that it rings so true. I was even given a wonderful anecdote by a Galway poet about his long-ago experience on slow-moving trains. It is very satisfying to hear that this story is speaking to a generation from a time I myself barely experienced.

Finally, if you’re willing to reveal, what are you working on now?

There are poems to coerce, new stories to plámás into life. Someone has asked me to write a one-act play, the one constraint being that it has to be set in a bar – which, for an Irish writer, surely has to be the most liberating constraint conceivable! And now I’ve put the hex on myself and no doubt I’ll soon be muddling again…

Wow, a play in a bar. Interesting indeed. And poems. Good luck with that. I look forward to reading what comes of the muddling!

As the second in my “Writers Chat” series, I’m delighted to re-visit my interview with poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice which first took place in June 2016.

Gabriel Fitzmaurice ‘The Irish A.A. Milne’ (Declan Kiberd)

SG: Congratulations on the launch of Will You Be My Friend? at the 2016 Listowel Writers’ Week. Will You Be My Friend strikes me as a poetry collection that will be picked up again and again – not unlike Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Tell me, Gabriel, how did you manage the selection process of poems from your previous collections. Did you involve readers, or family, or did you select your own favourites?

I chose my own favourites from my children’s books in the English language. (I have written a couple of books for children as Gaeilge too). In choosing, I took into account the poems that go down well when I read them to children in schools, libraries, bookshops etc. I also had adults, Moms and Dads, Nanas and Grandads etc as well as the general reading public in mind as, to quote the writer and journalist Billy Keane, “these poems cross over to adults as well”. And, as you say, adults “secretly enjoy them” – particularly the naughty ones!

SG: I think that’s the key, Gabriel! I have to say, many of the poems are deceptively clever. I’m thinking here of ‘What’s a Tourist’ which works on so many levels. Do these type poems come easily to you or are they about drafting and editing?

You say that the poems are “deceptively clever”. A lot of people feel that way about my poems, my poems for adults too. I try to make my poems readable, enjoyable and accessible. I believe that poetry should give pleasure as well as making one think. Sometimes the poems can be read on a number of levels which is OK too: some words have multiple meanings, for instance. The first draft of a poem comes easily to me. I am inspired to write, thank God – I don’t say “I must sit down and write a poem now”. A phrase, a line, a verse possess me and I simply have to get it down – be that when I’m driving my car (I pull over and write) or in my bed (I’ll get up in the middle of the night if it comes to me in a dream). Then the hard work begins. I edit, change, edit to make my meaning as clear as I can make it. This can take a long time until I’m finally satisfied. Sometimes I’m lucky – the poem comes clean onto the page at the first draft. “What’s a Tourist?” is one such poem. I was in class one day and the cigire (the inspector) was questioning my class about Geography. He was boring them silly. When he asked them “What’s a tourist” one young boy had enough and said “a man with a camera taking photos of a cow”. Just like that. I just wrote down what he said!

SG: It often takes a child to say it as it is, I think! You touch on bodily functions in poems like ‘Diarrhorea’, ‘Shampoo’, ‘Bursting Pimples’ and ‘Pooh’. Children of a certain age love, and adults squirm but secretly laugh at them. Yet they deal with situations that we’ve all found ourselves in or witnessed happen to another person. How do you find these poems go down when you read them to a crowd?

I write about things that matter to real people, be they children, adults or myself. I remember the rhymes we had in the schoolyard when I was growing up in the 1950s and early ‘60s. They were real poetry, ours alone and some of them were VERY rude. We loved them all the more as they were our secret, not to be shared with adults. That’s what I try to do with my naughty rhymes. Children LOVE them. I visit a lot of schools, and learning support teachers constantly tell me that when reluctant readers give up on reading they still take great pleasure in my really rotten rhymes!

SG: It’s great to see children react to your poems – and, as you say, it’s often the rhymes and the rhythms that reluctant readers connect with. Sometimes these same children might even try extending your verses or writing their own. ‘Imagination’ is wonderfully inspirational. Was encouraging the creation of poetry one of your aims when you were gathering poems for this collection?

The poems are child-friendly and children love them. When I’m asked about writing for children vis-a-vis writing for adults I reply: “when I write for children I enter a child’s mind; when I write for adults, I get to know my own”. I hope that my poems will help children to cope with their own emotions – happiness, sadness, loss, death etc etc. When I give workshops, the children react to them and write their own poems under their influence.

SG: I think my children would love to attend one of your workshops! You cover a range of human emotions from the tragic death in ‘A little girl visits her brother’s grave’ to the amusing ‘School tour’ song that will be so familiar to readers, and the ‘A young child learns to writer’, again, so familiar, and the ‘Lonely Day’. Do you think that poetry mirrors life and that perhaps it could be a source of solace, or even company to young, and old?

Yes it does – if it’s any good. Seamus Heaney once said that poetry should be strong enough to help. I have been asked to write poems for funerals, mortuary cards, wedding anniversaries, people going into exile, exiles returning home, birthdays, football victories etc. Poems can help us deal with all sorts of occasions.

SG: I like that idea, that it cannot be ‘just’ a poem, that it has to be ‘strong enough to help’. Finally, Gabriel, tell me about the beautiful illustrations by artist Karen Vaughan. I was particularly taken with her interpretation of ‘Messing around.’

Karen Vaughan designed my covers for Liberties Press and I was delighted when they asked her to illustrate “Will You Be My Friend?” I LOVE her illustrations as I’m sure the children (and adults) will too. My only problem is that there are not enough of them, they are so good.

Yes, hopefully we will see more of her illustrations alongside more of your work soon – though you have said this might be your last collection but time will tell.

Thanks, Gabriel for such honest answers and readers can purchase Will You be My Friend? from Liberties Press here.